The present invention relates to a shipping order allocation apparatus.
Warehouse work for sending out intended articles from a warehouse is represented by picking work. The picking work is a series of work where a worker leaves a picking start point, moves around the storage shelves in the warehouse to collect articles designated by a shipping order, and arrives at a picking end point. Multi-order picking is one of the ways of such picking work, where a worker collects articles included in multiple shipping orders together. In this description, a set of shipping orders for which the articles should be collected together is referred to as shipping order group.
When the multi-order picking is employed, each worker is assigned one shipping order group; the worker moves around and visits the storage shelves storing the articles included in the shipping order group to collect the articles. To efficiently complete the picking work of this style, it is important to optimize the allocation of shipping orders, that is, which shipping order is to be allocated to which shipping order group (set of shipping orders). Hereinafter, the determination of shipping order allocation as described above is referred to as order allocation.
An example of an existing order allocation method is disclosed in JP 2011-37568 A.